


Throw your dreams into space like a kite

by Scribe



Category: Lord of the Rings RPF
Genre: M/M, Monaboyd Month 2013
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-30
Updated: 2013-06-30
Packaged: 2017-12-16 16:58:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/864400
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Scribe/pseuds/Scribe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You can change as many surnames as you like, but his mother's heritage isn't easily lost. (a very slightly magical AU)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Throw your dreams into space like a kite

**Author's Note:**

> WARNINGS: This fic deals significantly with the death of Billy's parents and Dom's grandmother.

Billy has his father's coloring, nothing but pure Boyd in his green eyes, the reddish tint to his hair, but the bone structure beneath it all is his mother's. People used to remark on it, cheerfully when his parents were alive for comparison's sake, and with small sad smiles afterward. It's an odd sort of resemblance. It's almost as if he was born Boyd on the outside and McEachern underneath. Maggie is the same way, and so are most of his relatives; you can change as many surnames as you like, but his mother's heritage isn't easily lost.

 

McEachern babies have always been sensitive, prone to startling at nothing and developing inexplicable likes and dislikes for particular people and places. That doesn't matter much; babies cry for no discernable reason all the time. It's when they get a little older that it becomes a problem. Generations of parents have placated teachers and ministers and in-laws, shaking their heads over an overactive imagination. Luckily, by the time most children are old enough to know fantasy from reality, McEachern children have learned the difference between their reality and everyone else's, and they know better than to ever tell anyone what they see.

When he was young, Billy had been jealous of Maggie's power. She was already a year older than him, just a little bit better at everything, and it didn't seem fair that she had the most powerful ability in generations too. Not that anyone actually said that, not in those words and not around Billy, but he wasn't stupid. Who wouldn't want to see the future? Sure, it was only a couple hours or days ahead, and sure, she could only see him, but it was still probably the most useful kind of sight his family had ever produced.

He resented the fact that she saw him, too. She didn't use it to tattle- he might not have ever forgiven that- but it was still unnerving to know that your sister might possibly be seeing every single thing you did. At least his parents couldn't see any intimate details of his life. That had happened to some of his relatives, and it didn't bear thinking about. His mother could see the history of a place, what building had been there before this building, and what farm before that, and later his grandmother could see where on someone's body they were in pain. Neither of those had much potential for embarrassment. There were things a teenage boy could stand his sister seeing, if it absolutely couldn't be avoided, but not his mother, and certainly not his rather strict, old-fashioned grandmother. 

There was supposed to be a kind of code, that you didn't acknowledge any private thing you'd seen, but he wasn't confident that either of them would have stuck to it. His mother was certainly happy enough to have Maggie report on when he was going to hurt himself, or get in trouble- not that it could be stopped, but she was always well-prepared. Billy resented that too, sometimes, but when he broke his arm swerving his bike into a ditch he was glad that she'd called in sick that day and was waiting to drive him to hospital. 

His Uncle David used to try to cheer him up by saying that Billy's talent was more useful than his. That was true; David, who was his mother's older brother, could always see what was happening in one particular, random place, a bit of road along a weedy field. Based on the weather patterns and the occasional car that drove by he thought it was probably in North Wales somewhere. Having such a useless power didn't seem to bother him at all. Billy tried to pretend that it didn't bother him either, but he mostly felt like his McEachern blood had let him down.

***

He'd made a rule early on that Maggie wasn't allowed to tell him about auditions. Knowing ahead of time didn't change the outcome, and it only made the anxiety worse, fretting over whether she would call in addition to whatever director he was trying to impress. If she was never allowed to tell him, he didn't worry about whether she was lying, or avoiding the subject, or what it meant if she saw something or didn't, and he didn't have to sit on whatever knowledge she gave him until the real call came.

Of course, just because she didn't tell him didn't mean she didn't know. When he heard about Lord of the Rings he called her first thing and she answered the phone with, "Congratulations!"

"Thanks," he said, laughing. There was a high that went with getting a part no matter what it was, just simple somebody-likes-me-somebody-wants-me-I-won. "Been sitting on that long, have you?"

"Since yesterday," she admitted. "I was so tempted to tell you. It wouldn't set a pattern if I just did it once."

"Well, I'm glad you didn't."

"I know," she said fondly. "So, what do you think? Are you excited? New Zealand and all that?"

"A little nervous, actually," he said. "I haven't even read the books, you know."

"Oh, they're good, don't worry about it. It's going to be fantastic."

"Why, have you seen something?"

"Not a thing. It's just a good old unfounded gut feeling. You're going to love it."

She was right, of course. Maggie usually was.

***

Billy was thirteen when he stopped envying Maggie's power.

It was just after lunch on a Thursday and he was bored in class, idly watching his classmates' dreams from the night before instead of paying attention. There was a knock on the door, and then it opened and there was Maggie.

"Excuse me," she said. "I'm sorry for interrupting, but I need Billy. We have a family emergency."

They weren't supposed to let him out for something like that, but his teacher had had Maggie the year before, and she always left a good impression as a responsible girl, a good student. Besides, last year was the year their father was dying. The teacher would remember that. Even a new teacher might have let Billy go, though, because Maggie looked terrified. She was dead white, and although her voice was steady her hands were shaking. Billy got his things without even waiting for permission.

"What's happened?" he asked as soon as the door closed behind them. The school hallways were deserted and quiet, the occasional rumble of voices filtering in from one room or another.

"It hasn't, yet," she said. They didn't speak any more until they were off school grounds.

The walk home was just short of three-quarters of a mile. Maggie was quiet, but sometimes her steps would falter for a second, or she'd swallow hard or give the little quick headshake that she used when she wanted to jerk her vision back to the present. It was obvious she was still seeing it, whatever it was. Billy's talent might have been useless, but at least he could control it.

"Maggie," he said when he couldn't stand it any longer. "What is it? What did you see?" He was beginning to worry that he was walking to his own death, which was ridiculous; she wouldn't have pulled him out of school for that, for one, and for another he was definitely being overly dramatic. Even so, his stomach was knotted tight with worry.

"You're crying," she said. That didn't sound so bad, but the look on her face said it was. 

"Is it soon? Can you tell?"

"I think so. When we get home, probably. You're in your room." She shook her head again, angrily. Visions sometimes took her like that, repeating and repeating no matter what she did. She said it made her good at multitasking.

Billy was half-expecting some catastrophe, the house in flames maybe- no, that didn't make sense, she'd said he'd be in his room- but everything was just as they'd left it that morning, quiet and ordinary. Maggie fished her keys out of her pocket and then just stood there, making no move to unlock the door.

"I don't want to go in," she admitted. Her hand was white-knuckled around the key ring. 

"It won't change anything," he said. 

"I know. I know that," she said, and shook her head again. Billy dug his own keys out of his backpack and unlocked the door, lifting a little on the handle like you had to so the mechanism would work.

"It'll be fine," he said, even though he was scared enough to be a little bit nauseous now, just from watching her. "Come on, Maggie, it'll be okay." 

She never said it, but he knew Maggie blamed herself for letting him go first for a long, long time.

 

When it was- not over, because a thing like that was never over, but when they'd gotten the neighbors and called 999 even though there was no point, really, it was just the thing you did, and when everyone had come and gone except their grandmother who had come and stayed and was holding a wailing Maggie and not looking, not looking at the kitchen floor there, Billy shut himself in his room. He was choking on tears but he didn't dare cry. If he could manage it, if he could just not cry, then Maggie wouldn't have ever seen him doing it, she wouldn't have pulled him out of class, it would just be a normal day and they would come home at the usual time and his mother would be there. She would make them dinner in the kitchen where no one wanted to look. 

He knew it didn't make sense and he didn't care. His throat ached and his head ached and he couldn't breathe but it didn't matter, he would go on not breathing for as long as it took to get that dinner that was never going to be made. When the pressure of the tears got too much he drummed his hands on the bedspread and then his feet on the floor, clamped one hand over his mouth and slapped at himself with the other, his thighs, his chest, trying to find anything that would be a distraction.

It didn't work, of course. They'd learned long ago that what Maggie saw couldn't be prevented. He screamed when he started to cry, and kept screaming until he had to stop because he couldn't draw enough breath through the tears.

***  
When he was awake, Billy could look at a person and see their dreams, all the way back to childhood nightmares, though they got a little fuzzy when he went that far. He'd never broken the habit of flicking through his companions' dreams when he was bored, like channel-surfing the world's most surreal television, but he rarely bothered watching one all the way through. From an outside perspective dreams were mostly just nonsensical and boring. When he was sleeping, though, it was a different story. Asleep, he had no control, and he wasn't observing; he was the dreamer, except they were other people's dreams.

Dom didn't sleep well on the night his grandmother passed away. Billy knew this kind of dreaming- he knew all the kinds of dreaming- where the body insisted on sleep but something so big, so unconceivable had happened that the mind couldn't let it go. Dom, and therefore Billy, slept and woke and slept and woke. He dreamed of getting the phone call that afternoon, his mother in tears on the other end of the line, dreamed of somehow being there in the kitchen at home while she talked to him, dreamed of saying goodbye to his grandmother the week before and dreamed of the funeral that was yet to happen and dreamed of crying in New Zealand when he heard the news, turning it all over and over and over without it ever making sense.

Billy, helpless, dreamed it all with him. There was no distance here. He was Dom in the dream and he felt everything Dom felt, the awful knowledge that nothing was ever going to be the same again, the blank space that would never, ever be filled, the unyielding heartache that persisted even in the half-asleep moments when he didn't remember why. Billy woke from dreams of sobbing with his breath catching and his face dry. He hadn't cried anywhere but in front of a camera or on a stage since the day his mother died. He kept thinking he was there now, startling out of Dom's dreams and expecting his childhood bedroom, the sound of Maggie crying downstairs.

After a few hours he couldn't stand it anymore. There was too much tied up in Dom's grief, too many memories, things he couldn't bear to feel again. He dragged himself out of bed. Awake, the dreams fell away, and he stood there for a minute until his heart stopped pounding. He could just try to stay up all night, but there were meetings the next day, more first impressions, and besides, Dom was hurting. 

He didn't bother with shoes, just padded down the carpeted hotel hallways in his bare feet. Very hobbit-like, he thought to himself, and smiled a little. Everything seemed calm out here, dim and quiet and sleepy and safe. Even the ding of the elevator sounded muted. 

Dom's room was one floor down from him but in the same wing. They'd all swapped their spare keycards around after the third time someone (Elijah) got locked out, so he was able to let himself in. Dom was dreaming about the phone call again- it was easier to look now that he was awake and seeing it from the outside- but the edges of the dream melted away at the sound of the door.

"It's okay, it's just me," said Billy quietly. Dom had the curtains drawn, so when the door shut behind him it was pitch black. He felt along the wall until he found the bathroom light switch and flicked it on, squinting a little in the sudden brightness. Dom made a little sound and the sheets rustled, but he didn't say anything. He didn't go back to sleep, either; Billy was watching for his dreams.

Dom's toiletries were scattered across the bathroom sink, the ones he hadn't yet used still wrapped in sandwich bags inside a larger bag so they wouldn't spill on the flight. Billy rooted around and finally dug out two little boxes of allergy medicine, drowsy and non-drowsy. He popped one of the drowsy pills out with his thumbnail and carried that and a plastic hotel cup of tap water over to the bed.

In the light from the bathroom Dom's face looked young, and as exhausted as Billy felt. 

"Here," said Billy, handing over the water and the pill. "Come on, you have to get some sleep. We have to work tomorrow."

Dom just looked at him for a moment, then took the pill and gave the glass back. Billy put it on the nightstand.

"Thanks," whispered Dom. He lay down again. Billy wanted to say something comforting but he couldn't bring himself to offer platitudes. _It'll be okay_ was true, but it didn't help anything. He put a hand on Dom's shoulder instead, and Dom gave him a sad little half-smile, eyes still closed, and shifted a tiny bit closer.

That was right; Dom found being touched comforting. It was an odd thing to know about someone you'd only met a week ago, but they were all getting to know each other lightning fast, and more than that learning Dom felt somehow natural, like remembering a language you'd known as a child and then forgotten. When Dom had come back into the room after the phone call, eyes red and face blotchy, Billy had known to put a tentative arm around him and he'd turned and clung, burying his face in Billy's neck.

It felt foreign to Billy. He liked privacy when he was upset, maybe a relic of the way everyone hugged children at funerals without giving them any say in the matter, or maybe not- he couldn't remember far enough back to know if that had changed things. He didn't mind comforting other people, though, if he knew it was welcome. It wasn't hard to curl up behind Dom, put an arm around him and hold him tight until he fell asleep, really asleep, and didn't dream.

 

Billy woke up first in the morning. They had a little under and hour and a half to get going, so he checked that Dom was still sleeping dreamlessly and disentangled himself. The hotel room had a tiny kitchenette but Dom hadn't stocked it with anything. Billy stopped at his own room to shower and get dressed and then headed down to the hotel restaurant. You weren't really supposed to take food out, but they were pretty good about letting the group that was more or less living there have a little leeway, so Billy picked up eggs and pancakes and a couple mini cartons of cereal and ducked out again. The room was about a third Lord of the Rings people, a lot of faces he recognized but couldn't put names to yet, so he just nodded to them and didn't stop to talk.

He had to juggle the food to get back into Dom's rom. The shower was running- Dom must have had an alarm set- so he put everything down on the table and ate one of the boxes of cereal with his fingers, waiting. It occurred to him when the shower shut off that Dom might be naked and not expecting company. He somehow hadn't though of that when he went to get breakfast, he'd just figured Dom might want a little time before he had to head down and face the masses. 

Well, they were both actors, they'd dealt with worse. Billy went and got the complementary coffee pot and busied himself investigating its tea-making capabilities, keeping his back turned while the bathroom door opened in a rush of steam and Dom rustled around the room. He got some tea out of it in the end, so that was good. 

Eventually Dom dropped into one of the chairs and reached for the plate. He was wearing jeans and a thick sweatshirt; Billy would have to stop back at his room for a jacket. He kept forgetting that August was winter here, even though he'd been out in it every day.

"You sleep okay?" he asked, joining Dom at the table and stealing one of the pancakes.

"Yeah. Thank you," said Dom. "I needed it."

They ate quietly for a while. Halfway through his eggs Dom put his fork down, covered his face with his hands, and started to cry. It made Billy's stomach twist in a new way, not because of any of his own memories, but because there wasn't anything he could do.

***

At the age of sixteen Billy had a friend named Michael who was rapidly becoming something more. They spent too much time together, sat too close, talked too much, but they seemed to be stalled there, tense and anticipatory. Billy had the advantage because he knew that Michael dreamed about him. It was the only time in his life his talent had actually been good for anything, though he had to stop watching because even Michael's extremely vague and confused sex dreams were sex dreams about _him_ , and he was sick of hiding his erection under the desks at school and hoping nobody dropped a pencil.

Even armed with that knowledge he couldn't get past the stalemate they were in. People in movies seemed able to just kiss each other with no warning, but he didn't see how that could work in real life, if the other person wasn't an actor who'd been told to stand still. Billy had kissed someone before, a girl named Caroline, but that didn't count because a girl you accompanied home after a date knew to stand still so you could kiss her. It was in the script.

He told the story to Michael, who hadn't kissed anybody yet. He wasn't trying to brag, just to somehow get them nearer the conversation they kept not having, and it was the only relevant thing he could think of.

"I always worry I won't know how," confessed Michael. "I'll get to the end of a date and just mess it up terribly, and then no on will ever want to go out with me again."

"It's not so hard," said Billy. He probably sounded too eager, but he didn't care, because the script for this had finally, finally appeared. "Here, I'll show you how."

 

Figuring out how to touch each other after all that time was like a dam bursting. When they were together they couldn't keep their hands off each other, and when they weren't Billy was left in a haze of terror. Sooner or later- probably sooner- Maggie was going to see. He was pretty sure he wouldn't get kicked out of the house, but the difference between pretty sure and sure is enormous.

It never occurred to him to tell Michael what was going on. That was McEachern code, too: you never told anyone, except maybe if you planned on marrying them. Instead he just got more and more frightened, waiting for the axe to fall. When he couldn't take it anymore he went out and bought a pregnancy test, making sure the clerk at the convenience store was someone he didn't know, cornered Maggie, and waved it in her face.

"If you tell Gran I'll leave this for her to find, got it?" he said. It was the worst threat he could think of. Maybe they'd both get kicked out together.

Maggie glared at him and shoved past. She didn't say _tell her what?_ , which meant she already knew, which meant he might be too late, but there was nothing he could do about it now.

She never told, of course. One Christmas when they were in their twenties his grandmother mentioned Michael when she was catching them up on all the local gossip, not that she called it that. She'd run into his mother just the other day; he was married now, and expecting his first child, wasn't that nice? How quickly they grew up.

"Married, huh?" said Maggie when they were alone. "Who would've guessed?"

"Oh, he always liked women too," said Billy absently, the years turning back in his mind. "God, I was terrible to you. I'm sorry."

"It's all right. I probably needed a good threatening. I hadn't decided whether I was going to tell Gran, you know. I was so worried. I thought something was wrong with you." She said it with a huff of disbelieving laughter at her own past self. She knew everything about his partners, men and women- how could she not?- and it hadn't been an issue in years. Things look different when you grew up and left home, saw a little bit more of the world.

"You did?" he asked. She grinned at him.

"Well, now I know that there's something wrong with you. Maybe a couple of somethings. Must be all those glue fumes."

When his grandmother came back into the room she found them jostling on the couch like children, laughing and trying to push each other over with shoulders and elbows while they kept their gazes straight ahead.

***

About seven months into filming Maggie called to say that he should tell Dom.

"Tell him what?" he asked. Dom already knew about his sexuality; you had to be a lot more paranoid than Billy was to keep a secret like that on a set like this. "You mean tell him that I, um-"

"Aww, you um?" said Maggie, delighted.

"Of course I um. You've heard me talk about the man."

"I wasn't sure _you'd_ heard you talk about him, though. Anyway, no, you should tell him about our family."

Billy was starting to have a bad feeling about this. "When you say should, do you mean will?

"Well, yes. You will tell him. It'll go well, though, don't worry. I promise."

"If you say so," said Billy.

"I definitely do," she said. "And call me after."

 

Even knowing the conversation was coming, he didn't expect that Dom would be the one to bring it up. It was Sunday, and they were slowly waking up over brunch at Billy's second-favorite place because only crazy people wanted to cook on their day off.

"Hey, I wanted to ask you something," Dom said, pointing with his fork. "You remember the night after my grandmother passed away, when we were still in that hotel? How did you know I wasn't sleeping?"

"I just had a feeling," said Billy, almost by reflex. It was a tried and true McEachern line. People were willing to accept an amazing amount of implausible knowledge if you put it down to a feeling.

Most people.

"Bullshit," said Dom. "You barely knew me. I could have just finally fallen asleep and you would have woken me right up again."

"Maybe I was just being inconsiderate."

"That's a lot of trouble to take to be inconsiderate."

"And here I was hoping you'd say, 'inconsiderate, _you?_ '"

Dom snorted, but wasn't distracted. "So how did you know? Were you spying on me?"

"Well, in a way," said Billy. He hadn't ever explained this, and he didn't quite know where to start. "You're not going to believe me."

"Try me."

"I was watching your dreams." He really hoped Maggie was right about this going well. She had to be right.

"You were what?"

"Watching your dreams. It's a…thing, I can see other people's dreams. I could tell you weren't sleeping well."

Dom raised his eyebrows. "Really, that's what you're going with? Dream spying?"

"It's true!" said Billy. Dom just looked at him. He was surprised to find himself so insulted; there was no reason for Dom to believe him, after all. "Okay, fine, I'll prove it. Last night you dreamed about primary school. Night before that, trying to use an underwater phone booth, and something about bees in a greenhouse- oh, I'm in that one. Night before that, um-" he cleared his throat. "The night before that, running away from someone in a shopping mall, and then chasing them."

The one he'd skipped was a sex dream. Billy was in it, but that didn't mean anything; everyone had sex dreams about people they weren't actually interested in, doing things they didn't actually want to do. Billy had long since stopped being shocked.

Dom was staring at him.

"I didn't even remember all of those until just now," he said. "How did you do that?"

"I told you, I can see dreams," said Billy. He was only half paying attention, though, because he'd gotten distracted following the thread of Dom's dreams back over the months. He was in a lot of them. So were the other Rings people, and Dom's family, the usual cast of characters you might expect, but Billy had a starring role. And he was in almost all the sex dreams. It was one thing to occasionally dream something you wanted to forget about your sibling or your boss or one of your definitely platonic friends, but in Billy's experience- and Billy knew dreams better than anyone- when the dreams started repeating it started to mean something.

"You dream about me a lot," he said.

"Yeah," said Dom, looking embarrassed an a little lost. "Yeah, I do. Bill-"

"You're done, right? We can go?"

Billy hustled him out. The reason they ate at the second-best brunch place instead of the best one was that it was two blocks away from Billy's house, so it didn't take long for him to get Dom inside and back him up against the door.

"That means what I think it means, right?" he said at the last second. "That you dream about me?"

"Definitely," said Dom, and tugged him in by the belt loops.

A minute later Billy remembered what Maggie had said about the conversation going well, and laughed against Dom's mouth.

"Thanks for the heads up," he said to the empty air. "You can stop watching now."

"What? Who are you talking to?" asked Dom. Billy kissed him again. 

"You know what? I'll explain later," he said.

And, for the first time in his life, he did.

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to msilverstar, who managed to dig up information about Dom's grandmother.


End file.
